Monday, September 22, 2014

I’m a long time Sony Vegas fan. My history with Sony goodies dates back to Acid Pro 3, when was still developed by Sonic Foundry, which had created a very intuitive interface and workflow. Sony bought Sonic Foundry and started migrating all the programs to .Net Framework crap, and quality began to suffer.

Sony Vegas was still usable up to version 12. Not exactly fast, but pretty usable. Testing out this version 13 – build 373 is the lastest at the moment I write this post –, I’m deeply disgusted to what they have done. Without any noticeable improvement, the interface has got a bit uglier, and everything, absolutely everything is slower. I dislike laptops, I have a desktop computer with quite powerful hardware components, and even though, the timeline elements became sluggish when reacting to the mouse, the video preview rendering is blurred and skipping frames, and any cross-fading is simply not viewable due to slowness. Among other oddities.

After some hours of headache, I simply removed this version and reinstalled the version 12 back. What a relief. No more Vegas 13 over here. I hope Vegas 14 can have more luck – although I doubt it.

Friday, September 19, 2014

It seems that John Petrucci doesn’t know what he wants, so he changes the specs of his signature guitar each year. There are way too many versions so far, and no single place where you can find all the specs together, so I compiled a comprehensive chart of all John Petrucci models with Ernie Ball Music Man.

Note: this chart doesn’t include the dozens of limited series that have been released, just the standard specs.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Last month I restrung my 2004 Music Man JP6 with a .008 gauge string set, D’Addario EXL130. I started to feel very uncomfortable with the G string, because it has so much more tension than all the others. I even considered trading the JP6 for an Ibanez Jem, which I travelled about 150 km just to test for a couple minutes, and it felt good on my fingers, possibly due to my 8 years playing exclusively a 1996 UV7BK.

Then yesterday I took a different direction and it came to my mind the idea of assembling a balanced string set, thus fixing the problem with the heavy G string. I know that there are commercial balanced sets, but they just alleviate the problem, not fixing it. I found this excellent post on Jemsite, where the guy made a comprehensive chart with all D’Addario sets and tension of each string. The .008 data confirmed what my fingers already knew: the G string is much heavier than it should. Also, the A string is slightly heavier, but I really didn’t felt it that much.

What I can’t really understand is why all the string sets are so unbalanced, and why so few people complain about it.

In order to find the right gauge to balance my .008 set, I found a handy online calculator for string tension, not very intuitive, but accurate. With it, I found the gauge of .013 for the G string, instead of the .015, to balance my .008 set. The B string of an ordinary .010 set – D’Addario EXL110 – is exactly .013, so if I buy such a set I could pick the B string and use it. Also, the D string is a .026 gauge, which could replace my current A of .030, making my set more even.

After replacing these two strings, and loosening the spring claw and the truss rod a bit, my JP6 felt a lot better. Instant gratification. The heaviness of the G is finally gone, the bends are easier, and the slightly loosened A added a very smooth feel to the wound strings. And I love loose strings. Here is the tension chart comparison:

Saturday, June 14, 2014

When experimenting with some C99 features of C, I found a very cool trick to have named parameters, using a feature called designated initializers. The first time I read about designated initializers I must admit I found it to be pretty useless, but as I started testing it out, I ended up finding it very useful, since it can make code a lot more readable. Using it together with variadic macros, it was possible to have a very clean named parameter system.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

I have an ordinary Apache installation on an Ubuntu 12 OS, where the root webserver directory is ordinarily pointing to /var/www. I have many subdirectories within it, and I’d like to have one of these subdirectories using clean URLs, specifically becaused I was testing some RESTful API stuff. However, I’ve struggled a bit to make Apache recognize my .htaccess file.

So, after some minor stress, here it is the quick step-by-step guide of what I did, without further explanations:

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Within the Directory /var/www directive, change AllowOverride None by AllowOverride All. Then run these two commands:

Friday, March 28, 2014

I’ve been doing a lot of C++11 research and coding ultimately, and I’m still upset with the C++ exceptions. When reading the concepts, it seems to be a reasonably good alternative to simply return a boolean, but as you try to stuff it in your code, you begin to feel like manipulating a stressed hedgehog. And it’s very frustrating, since you have to stop thinking about your code – what really matters –, to think about the implications of the code you are writing upon the code itself.

Usually, my needs are really simple, I just need an extended way to report a success or a failure from a function. I never wrote something that really needed to tackle differents kinds of errors: it’s just success, or failure with a reason, which usually popped in an alert message box.

After quitting the exceptions, when trying to solve this problem, my first move was to use an extra string pointer as the last parameter to hold eventual error messages. It goes like this:

There is no problem with this approach, and I used it for quite some time. It is clear, and one would have no doubts about what is going on. It is, however a bit cumbersome to write all those pErr checks. So at some point I started considering something else.

My second approach was to use a standard pair as the return type to the function. Something like this:

I never really used this. It doesn’t look clear enough, and the declaration of the pair variable, just to hold the return value, doesn’t amuse me.

Then I start thinking about writing a “bool on steroids” class, specifically overloading the operator bool, so there would be no need to declare a variable just to hold the result value of the invoked function. This is the class:

This approach looks a lot elegant to me. It’s clean, allows the chaining of error messages, and it even allows the inheriting of the Failed class to add more specific error data – although I never really needed this.

The only thing which makes me uncomfortable with this class is the _hasFailed member, which holds a reversed boolean value of the object meaning: if there’s a success, it’s false; if there’s a failure, it’s true. I implemented it this way so that I could use a declaration of the class within an if statement, with no need to declare a variable just to hold the result, as I did on the previous example when I returned a standard pair. Also, it explains why I chose the name “Failed” instead of something like “BigBool”: to explicit the idea of a failure being handled by the if.

Other than that, I consider it a neat approach, and that’s the best solution I could come up with so far.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

As an audophile, I care a lot about my music collection. Some albums do have multiple pressings, with new remastered versions of the same old material. These remasters rarely surpass the originals, they tend to be overcompressed due to the infamous loudness wars, but I always seek to hear them, waiting for a miracle.

Right now I’m listening to the Queen 2011 remasters, which sound all really bad to my ears. I’ve read somewhere that Bob Ludwig was responsible for this work, but it’s hard to believe that such a great professional have done such a shitty job. Some songs – particularly the heavier ones – have so much compression that distortion is openly audible. The Jazz album is the worst one so far, with burnt peaks on all tracks, a mess of noise.

The Sheer Heart Attack song, from News of the World album, is a full block of deafening noise, that gave me a headache before the second minute ended, and I had to skip it. The same for the heavy parts of Brighton Rock and Stone Cold Crazy, from Sheer Heart Attack album. Basically, the songs are ruined, sounding really harsh, overcompressed on every single opportunity.

Label managers of today are not only stupid, they are deaf too. When I see things like this, I only can hope that digital music distribution kills this industry as soon as possible, as it is already happening. With the home studios and the internet, we don’t need their greed anymore.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Today I was going to write about my fruitful experiments in JavaScript using anonymous closures, scope and namespacing in general. But I stumbled across two articles that are so good, that I just felt the need to publish the links to both, because they explain everything I was about to write in great detail:

Thursday, January 9, 2014

About 2 years ago I was suffering from some wrist pain, due to countless hours of computer work with an ordinary mouse. I started searching for some device to relieve the pain, and after test several gadgets, I came across the Logitech Trackman Wheel. It’s a trackball which sphere is moved with the thumb, leaving the whole hand resting on the desk. And it’s absolutely great, precise, comfortable, I could use that thing for hours without any signs of tiring.

This week, however, the left click just started acting numb, unresponsive, and I found a video teaching a way that could possibly fix it. After three days, the problem seemed to be unfixable, so I decided to buy another unit of this wonderful thing. But to my surprise, I found out the Logitech discontinued the Trackman Wheel, in favor of a wireless version called M570, which like any laggy wireless device, relies on batteries, which require you to figure out when they start dying, so you can buy more batteries to replace the old ones, if you don’t have them dying in the middle of an online game, for example, case when you’d be screwed. Oh, and also it has an annoying switch to turn on and off, so that’s another thing you have to remember to do. The Trackman is supposed to stay fixed on the desk, so why the hell do you need a wireless version of it?

I’m not the only one who wants the wired Trackman Wheel back, there’s even a group on Facebook with people discussing this. Unfortunately, Logitech didn’t reply the user complains, and so far there’s no hope to have a wired version of our beloved Trackman Wheel.

I could not find any unit to buy, not even on eBay. By now, I’m desperately trying to find a way to fix my old and good Trackman Wheel, to use it for as long as I can. And to Logitech, for blindly joining this wireless bandwagon, I just want to leave a sincere fuck you, Logitech.

Update, Jan 11:
This morning I found a skillful electrician who managed to swap the bad left click component with the middle click one, which was working fine. Now I don’t have a middle click anymore, but at least my beloved Trackman Wheel is usable again.